The Gift of Real Food

When I started milling and baking our bread, I was a little concerned that my husband and I would gain some weight. After all, the bread tastes so good that we eat half the loaf when it is still warm.  It has been two months and something strange has happened.  I have lost 4 pounds.  I wasn't trying to lose weight.  I was just trying to eat healthier as I've been replacing some processed food with more natural ones.  I'm not overweight - just at the high end of the healthy range.  My weight does not normally fluctuate.   I think the real food has been so satisfying that I just haven't wanted to eat junky food.  I do think that if I started getting into making a bunch of homemade cakes and cookies with my fresh flour, I would be in trouble.  The cookies I have made are dangerous.  They are so good that I can't stay away from them.  Even with the healthier flour, they still have the sugar.

I want to emphasize that I'm not saying you will lose weight if you use freshly milled flour and make your own baked goods.  My point is that if you are making healthy baked goods and eating them instead of less healthier options, you probably aren't going to gain weight and might even lose some weight.  If you use the flour to make a bunch of cookies, cakes and pies, you're on your own.  I think bread has gotten a bad rap because many breads are nutrient deficient and are considered empty calories.  If your bread is full of vitamins, minerals, and fiber, you will feel more satisfied and not want to eat more to feel full.

I still haven't tackled the specifics of the nutritional value of using freshly milled flour - there is so much information on that one that it might take me a while to condense it down into one or two articles.

Homemade Graham Crackers

Today we made graham crackers. Laura, my 4 year-old, helped mix them up and then we rolled the dough into a jelly roll pan to bake.  I don't eat graham crackers but Laura really likes them so I thought this would be a better alternative.  Ironically, she didn't care for them.  She said she likes the ones from the factory better.  My son, Sam, really liked them and was very excited at the prospect of getting them in his lunch.  He said they were much better than the ones from the factory (his words, not mine).

The recipe I used was from the breadbeckers.com site.  I love this website.  They have a lot of great information about freshly milled flour.  I altered the recipe by using brown sugar instead of sucanat (since I did not have any) and I also just made a half the recipe since it was my first time making it and I wasn't sure what to expect.  I also used dry milk instead of evaporated milk since I did not have evaporated milk.

If you like graham crackers, this is a great recipe to try.  Eating a graham cracker fresh out the oven made it worth the effort.  I would like to find a recipe to make something similar to a whole grain or multigrain Wheat Thin or Wheatables cracker.

Comment Settings

I have changed my comment settings so anyone can leave comments - I would love to hear from you (unless you are a spammer - if so, please go away).

Do you mill?  Do you want to mill? Do have any questions? Please post them.  Then I won't think I am just talking to myself out here and will keep blogging.  Thanks!

Why do I mill my own flour?

There are several reasons people mill flour. The ones that come to mind are:

-Taste
-Nutrition
-Variety of grains available to mill is much greater than the variety flours available to most people
-Self-sufficiency in the event of a food shortage or hardship

The first two, taste and nutrition, are the main reasons that I mill.

Taste: We were using store-bought whole wheat flour previously and when we switched to freshly milled hard white wheat, the difference in taste was amazing. We were using the exact same recipes with the exception of the flour. Everything tastes better. Not just a little better - it is "party in your mouth" better. Why does it taste so much better? First, fresh always tastes better anyway. Store-bought flour has been sitting on a shelf for possibly months. If nothing has been removed, the germ and bran will start to go rancid. Rancid food doesn't taste good. If the germ and bran has been removed, you aren't really getting whole wheat flour anyway so you are losing some nutrition.

If taste was the only reason, I don't think that's enough of a reason to mill my own flour. If I want something that really tastes good, I can add enough really tasty ingredients or buy tasty bread from a local baker if I don't mind spending the money. However, if you put taste and nutrition together, then I'll pay attention. In my next blog post, I'll talk about the nutritional reasons I mill my own flour.

As a sidenote, people have asked if milling provides a cost savings. The answer is: it depends on what you compare it to. My flour is more expensive than white flour however it about the same price as a good store-bought whole wheat flour. However, if you compare buying a quality loaf of bread from a bakery to making your own bread from freshly milled flour, home-baked bread will be cheaper but my time is worth something too so it's not fair comparison. So, do I mill my own flour to save money?... absolutely not - it is a labor of love that I do purely because it tastes so good and I know it is healthier for my family.

Is Processed Food Really the Enemy?

The term "processed food" is interesting. We use it to label anything that is bad for you that is mass produced in a factory. The definition at Wikipedia.com doesn't match up with how we generally use the term:

"Food processing is the set of methods and techniques used to transform raw ingredients into something we can eat or to transform food into other forms for consumption by humans or animals either in the home or by the food processing industry. Food processing typically takes clean, harvested crops or butchered animal products and uses these to produce attractive, marketable and often long shelf-life food products. Similar processes are used to produce animal feed." (end of definition)

So, unless you are eating raw food as it naturally occurs, you are eating processed food. To narrow that definition, we could say that food is only considered processed if someone else processed it but does that necessarily make it bad? Or maybe just use the definition that if it has been processed in a factory, it is processed. So is my mom's homemade apricot jam is OK since she processed it at home and it wasn't made in a factory? I had considered trying to eat only unprocessed food even for a day (meaning eating no food processed in a factory) but then I decided that didn't really take into account that some food made in a factory might actually be a healthy option and I wasn't willing to give it up just to be able to tell myself I don't eat processed food. For example, I like my soy milk, cheese, mustard for my sandwich, almond butter to put on my bread, and even the syrup for my waffles. I know the syrup is bad for me but I'm not willing to give it up at this point. I'm also not willing to give up dark chocolate. The vast majority of what I eat is not processed in a factory and I keep replacing the things I can. If I really love a food that I can't make myself, I'll keep eating it even if it is considered processed.

Next up on my list to try: replacing store bought graham crackers with homemade ones. I'll keep you posted on that one.

Eating on the Go

One of my challenges as my kids are getting more involved in activities is that we are in the car more. The temptation is to stop somewhere to eat if we get hungry but being a frugal mom who is minimizing processed food, that makes no sense at all to me. So before we go anywhere, I always make sure we have water and some homemade bread and fruit and we are good to go. For a treat, I put Nutella on the bread - that tastes so much better than anything I could get in a drive-through. My goal is to always have enough food in the car so I won't ever feel like I need to stop and buy something that I don't really want to eat. I have always done this so my kids don't even know the drive-through is an option. If we will be gone during meal time, I pack the entire meal. For quick snacks, I used to do fruit snacks for the kids and granola bars for me but we've replaced that with real fruit and real bread. At some point, I will start making granola bars. No one seems to miss the junky food.

Suggestion Box

Please let me know if you have an idea or question for me. I'll try to cover it in an upcoming blog post. I have lots of topics I'd like to cover but if there is something you want to know about flour milling or avoiding overly processed foods, I'll do my best to answer you.

You can make general comments to this blog post or if it relates to a specific post I've already made, just comment there.

Why am I blogging?

I'm going to back up now and answer a question I've been pondering for a while now. Why am I blogging?

It started with the flour milling - I really love everything about it and would like to share information with others who might like to try it. I won't try to re-invent the wheel so if there is already good info online, I'll happily just link you to resources when I can. I started milling my own flour in August 2010 and in looking for information on milling I found that there are definitely home millers out there but very few people have even heard of this. My hope is that I can build a community so we can share and build our knowledge.

Now that I am milling and baking more I have been making a shift away from overly processed foods. Our family has always tried to stay away from unhealthy foods but I feel like I had done all I could until I really began to question everything we ate and if there was a better way if I made it myself. This idea will be a common theme in my posts.

I also hope to leave a legacy for my children so they will have a solid foundation as far as what real food really is and how to make good choices now and throughout their lives.

Peanut Butter Play Dough

This is a fun twist on play dough - you can eat it and it tastes great! I have been craving cookie dough lately but because of the egg scare recently, I have stopped eating it. The temptation to lick the beaters is unbelievable. This playdough is a great substitute. I store mine in the fridge and it really does taste better when you make it fresh but it is fine for a few weeks when stored in the fridge. I haven't tried to alter the recipe yet but wouldn't it be fun to add chocolate chips?

SMOOTH PEANUT BUTTER PLAY DOUGH

Ingredients:
2 cups smooth peanut butter
2 cups rolled oats
2 cups dried milk
2/3 cups honey

Directions: Mix all ingredients until thoroughly combined. Storage: When not using, MUST be stored in an airtight container.

Recipe from: http://www.squidoo.com/EdiblePlayDough#module12772397

Grated Cheese Revelation

I've started to grate my own cheese again. I don't remember when bags of pre-grated cheese became popular - the 90s? I remember thinking how cool it was that I no longer had to grate my own cheese - imagine the time I would save shredding and washing that grater! Then I got a cheese grater from IKEA this summer. I reasoned that, if the cheese could be grated into an enclosed container, maybe grating wouldn't be so bad. Seriously, I can't believe how lazy I am sometimes.

What I didn't realize was how much better the cheese tastes. What was I thinking all these years buying bags of grated cheese? Last night, I made some tortillas with pureed black beans, tomatoes, shredded mozzarella and some leftover steak and I could really tell the difference with the cheese. (thanks to my friend, Kari, for the tortilla and black beans idea - we eat it all the time). Oh, and in case you are wondering, I got some nice white flour tortillas at the store - I have not mastered making my own tortillas yet and I love the processed white tortillas from the store.

What does pre-grated cheese have in it that might affect the taste? Cellulose to prevent caking and natamycin, "a natural mold inhibitor." Or maybe the difference is that it wasn't grated a few minutes before eating.